House of Eratosthenes

I was just wondering about this comment I put up at Old Iron & KC’s place. Background: Old Iron was noticing (with great glee) that yet another member of Canada’s upper crust elite is doing the southward walk-of-shame, turning his back on the glorious canuck ‘free” health care system to partake of some of our own services. You remember our health care system, right? That horrible awful one that needs changing so badly? And so he proceeded to grill KC about it and make her squirm a little. Or maybe a lot.

And I made the point that when you remove the meaningless details from our recent health care fiasco — I don’t know if I can write about it in the past tense or not, but God I really do hope I can — the whole thing is nothing more than another ride on the same stupid merry-go-round. And health care itself is one of the meaningless details. It’s just the latest thing to be “reformed,” or for them to try to reform, and the reform always goes the same way.

The “health care” aspect of it really doesn’t matter, because it’s the same story as any other commodity. Just name one. Education for your children, legal services, barrels of crude oil.

“The rich” can get ahold of it and the poor people cannot, so someone gets the idea of “reform.” No one defines what the R-word really means, because anyone who’s in a position to communicate with the public about it understands reform is only appealing until people understand what it is. So some new laws are created to make the commodity “equally available to everyone.”

Which, it turns out, doesn’t mean the poor can get it. It means the rich people can’t. And was anyone wondering why people refer to socialism as “trickle-up poverty”?

Except if you get to watch how the politicians live, up close, you see something rather interesting. Whatever the commodity is…they can get ahold of it a lot more easily than the rich people were ever able to. Proceed to re-enact the scene with Squealer and the milk & apples from George Orwell’s Animal Farm…

This cycle [is] absolutely consistent, event for event, with each and every market the United States has semi-nationalized…and the U.S. has semi-nationalized quite a lot. My country’s gutless this way; we like to go halfway on things. That way we don’t have to admit that some things work and other things don’t.

Yes, that last part is worth re-reading again. Admitting that there’s a right way & a wrong way to do something, really does take balls. Some people just don’t have ’em. They don’t want to admit this is true about anything — even though, in reality, it’s probably true about damn near everything. And so everything is “middle of the road” because of the balls these people don’t have. These loud, loud people. Their one consistency ends up being “I am absolutely opposed to the death penalty”; and then, given enough time, they’ll come across a situation that requires an exemption from even that.

So they don’t want any rules; they’re anarchists who don’t want to admit that they’re anarchists. They want every little thing to be decided on a case by case basis. They are gregarious, friendly, trusting people, and they seem to have gotten it in their heads that any “common sense” decision anybody ever makes about anything, will be to their liking. I don’t know where they get this. I don’t think they know either. But it isn’t stopping them.

Let us count all the other things worth mentioning, shall we?

1. The “Status Quo”: Irony be here. One of the hottest squares in Obama Speech Bingo is the one captioned “false choice.” As our President uses the phrase, it has diminished to the level of a thoughtless verbal tic, a reflex. He can’t stop Himself from saying it anymore. What He’s really talking about is the False Dilemma Fallacy: “When two alternatives are presented…[t]his can lend credence to the larger argument by giving the impression that the options are mutually exclusive, even though they need not be.” The irony is — quick, what’s the best possible example in recent memory? Why, it’s President Obama’s favorite dichotomy! If you’re not for the “reform”…you must be among “those who want to preserve the status quo.” How’s that work out? Can you find me a hundred people who are opposed to the reform? Won’t take long to round ’em up…now, once you have those hundred, can you promise me each and every single one of them is tickled pink with the status quo? Cross your heart & hope to die, stick a needle in your eye? Of course you can’t. At least sixty…and probably eighty…are wrestling with avoidance-avoidance conflict. President Obama’s choice is false. But he continues to repeat it. This is part of that cycle that continues to play out, across all those other events involving semi-nationalization of those other commodities. That is how they were done. You had to support the “reform”…or else you must be in favor of the “status quo,” and nobody liked the status quo. So reform it is. Except — in each and every single case — things didn’t really go so hot in the long run.

2. Debunking “Urban Myths”: Since vagueness is the best friend of the proponent of the “reform,” no one is in a position to definitively state what exactly is involved in the final “reform” plan until it has been signed into law. By which time, of course, it’s too late to talk about anything. And so as the critics do what critics are supposed to do, and enlighten the public about some of the things that really deserve attention as the details are being hashed out, the proponents highlight these concerns as “urban myths” and start to “debunk” them. Case in point? Sarah Palin’s “death panels.” Politifact named it “Lie of the Year.” I seem to recall more than one left-leaning commenter pointed out that hey, it can’t be true, the legislation hasn’t even been written yet. Well no duh…that’s kind of the point isn’t it, Sparky? Wherever there’s an unknown, you have to figure out who you’re going to be asked to trust, and how much you trust them. Even as of today, to my knowledge, the debunkers have yet to come up with a single example of a country with socialized medicine that doesn’t have some kind of Death Panel — call it what you will.

3. Aristocracy. There always is one, after all the dust has settled. The people who write the legislation that ultimately defines what kind of [insert name of commodity here] we are going to be consuming, and how it is to be apportioned among us, never, ever, ever use the same machinery to get theirs. They enjoy the exclusive use of a bypass gate. From time to time we all make a bunch of noise about it, and people get really upset. But it blows over.

4. Half a Loaf. The people who are “for” the plan, after it has been put in place, end up making such an incredible weak show of their apologia that it hardly sounds complimentary at all. Go back and read KC’s commentary about the Canadian health care system. That’s precisely what I’m talking about. The waiting is interminable and the “free” services aren’t really free, they’re expensive as all holy hell. BUT — well, but something. It’s a mix of good-and-bad. The road always leads back there…mix of good and bad. Now ask yourself this: Would you ever, in a million years, be able to sell “reform” that way to a country that hadn’t yet signed on to the reform? I can just see Obama with that one now: “Folks, Let Me Be Clear. Make No Mistake. After we enact my ‘reform,’ things are still going to suck a whole lot and suck large. It’ll be a mix of the good and the bad. But For Far Too Long, as a country we’ve been tring to make things better than they were before when we try to fix things. We need to have the courage to change, even if it’s scary change, change that makes things worse. Even bad change is better than no change at all. For you little people, I mean. I don’t need to change of course, I’m perfect as I am.” It would be honest. But I don’t think the pundits would gather the following Sunday morning to proclaim “His last speech was the Best Speech Evar, until this one, and now this is the Best Speech Evar!!” At least, I think they probably wouldn’t say that. But at this point who the hell knows.

5. NOW! President Obama took a lot of hammering over his strong-arming Congress to pass health care “by Christmas.” And after it became clear it was costing Him some support, He kept right on doing it. That’s because this is part of the cycle. It always goes this way. It happens to you, you’ll see, when you think back on your own personal past events. It’s how salesmen sell shitty things. “Of course you don’t have to sign today, but I have another couple interested in this house, matter of fact they came by here just the other day…hey why don’t we go to my office for some coffee, and you can sign some papers and at least get your name in? Have you got your checkbook?” This is starkly at odds with the other thing that happens, about the status quo. It’s supposed to be such a widespread realization, an undeniable one, that the status quo reeks so much. If that was really the case, and a point presented honestly, you’d be able to put your “reform” on a table and let it just sit there, while the representatives eventually come ’round to the unavoidable conclusion that buying-in is just the smart thing to do. See, that is how good products are sold. But the Apple-Milk bandwagon cannot afford to tolerate it. It’s like a “gorgeous” actress whose time has passed, one who is overly-reliant on the perfect makeup and lighting. Up close, she doesn’t look that good and she damn well knows it. So it has to be sold now, now, now! When we buy things for our household, a lot of us raise a red flag when we hear that pitch. Somehow, with public policy, a lot of us don’t.

6. Bad Examples. Even though nobody can say anything good about this “reform” after all’s been said & done, other jurisdictions will seek to emulate it as if it had been wildly successful. The results here will be far superior to the results there, the proponents (in the new country) will say. The same basic framework may have been tried a dozen times…a hundred times…and failed each and every single time. Still people will want to go for it. They’ll say the reason it didn’t work out too well in whoozeewotsitplace is — well, the right people weren’t in charge. Some variant of that theme. You know why that is? It’s because the proponents aren’t really proponents of the plan per se. They are proponents of a lifestyle that is associated with the plan; the lifestyle that has to do with sacrificing opportunity and freedom for the sake of a little temporary security. There is something obsessive-compulsive and manic-depressive about viewing life through this lens. People who do it that way want everyone else they know to do it that way, too. So the plan is to the lifestyle, you might say, as a man-carved idol is to the deity it is supposed to represent. It’s just a manifestation. If prosperity surrounds the idol, this is testament to the power and the benevolence of the deity. But if there is suffering wherever the idol goes, it ceases to carry any symbolic weight and is no longer representative of the will or karma involved in the deity. The stupid sculptor must not have carved it right. Our village is dying, and our suffering has been most acute since this idol was put up, but our deity is a good one.

You know… this is perhaps one area that we agree on Morgan!!
Thanks for the linkage and your take on it.

Old Iron still can’t comment here (for some reason) but he says thank you as well.

KC & Old Iron
- KC | 02/04/2010 @ 09:19
This is starkly at odds with the other thing that happens, about the status quo. It’s supposed to be such a widespread realization, an undeniable one, that the status quo reeks so much.

Isn’t this how the Russian revolution got started? Lenin and the Bolsheviks (a great name for a rock band, actually) got the Russian people all riled up about how the status quo (Czar Nicholas II’s regime) sucked so much, and told them how everything and everyone would be better off under communism. In the peoples’ defense, things DID kind of suck under the czar.

Of course, we all know how that experiment ultimately turned out. The Bolsheviks were orders of magnitude worse, replicating every evil act commited by the czar and then some. In fact, this has been the case in every political revolution I can think of, save our own.

Lenin and his friends (and his successors) eventually gained complete control of the government, to the point where input from the common people was not required or even allowed. Ultimately millions of them died of starvation, in death camps, and in various purges down through the years. I hate to break it to the Left, but that is ultimately where Obama’s road takes us. Not in this administration, of course, but too many like his in a row and that’s where we can end up.

Be wary of anyone who wants to sell you a bill of goods based only on how much the present circumstances suck. At least ask the right questions and make sure they’re answered to your satisfaction, and then hold the reformer to his promises. Remember, one of the funny little things about life: It’s never so bad that it cannot get worse.
- cylarz | 02/04/2010 @ 23:58

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Thursday, February 4th, 2010